New and Selected Poems

Henri Coulette (1927-1988), who spent most of his life in Los Angeles, was regarded as a master craftsman and a quiet original by his teachers Robert Lowell and John Berryman, his peers Donald Justice, W.D. Snodgrass, Thom Gunn, and Philip Levine, and his students Wanda Coleman, Michael Harper, and Luis Omar Salinas. His first volume, The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems (1966), won the Lamont Poetry Prize and received significant praise, but his second, The Family Goldschmitt (1971), was accidentally pulped by the distributor. A third volume only saw publication as part of his Collected Poems (1990), now long out of print.Michael Caines works at the Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2013) and the editor of a TLS bicentennial celebration of Jane Austen. He is writing a short book about literary prizes, and a slightly longer book about Brigid Brophy. He is founding editor of the Brixton Review of Books.Boris Dralyuk is the author of My Hollywood and Other Poems (2022), editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (2016), co-editor of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015), and the translator of Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, and other authors. His poems, translations, and criticism have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Best American Poetry 2023, and elsewhere.

'We have in Henri Coulette a new major minor poet to marvel at: his forms are exact, his humour dark and wry, and he wears his learning lightly. Credit must go to the editors and to Carcanet for recognising that Coulette is a secret better shared than kept.'Austin Spendlowe, Review 31